> In short, the single-player game was not sustainable. So why should we think the current model is? The single-player game is very sustainable. It's just not

> In short, the single-player game was not sustainable. So why should we think the current model is? The single-player game is very sustainable. It's just not as lucrative unless you double-down on in-game monetization like Ubisoft does. Devolver Digital is plenty stable, even though it makes a tiny fraction of the revenue we see from "AAA" publishers. > In 2008, those three publishers released 98 games; in 2018 they released just 28, not including expansions. Well there's the problem. If you focus all of your effort on a few large-scale projects, you will have to milk those projects for all you can. There's still a huge market for small and medium-scale projects, though. The indie market is thriving. > Independent developers, meanwhile, continue to fight for the smallest slice of an impossibly crowded market. How is this an indication of a struggling industry? This just tells me that the market is easy to break into, which should be hailed as a positive. Of course "indie" studios aren't going to individually be responsible for a large slice of the market. They don't have the budgets to fund massive projects with a ton of marketing. However, I'd be pretty interested in seeing just how much money "indie" titles as a whole bring in and how that has compared to the rest of the market over time. I'd guess it's grown significantly over time and that's the real reason why "AAA" publishers struggle with smaller scale games. There's a reason "AAA" publishers like EA want to be associated with some of these games. > And Sony already offers a streaming service, PlayStation Now, which is likely to expand in the next generation. If PlayStation Now is anything to go by, I wouldn't put a lot of stock in xCloud or Stadia. There's a lot of buzz around it now, but I doubt game streaming will get any mainstream traction for a long time. > [a bunch of talk about data center power efficiency and climate change] And how does this compare to the amount of energy spent running games natively? I'm sure Microsoft's, Sony's, and Google's servers are configured to utilize hardware much more efficiently than my gaming PC. This seems like an out-of-nowhere tangent to me and the article doesn't provide enough information about it to really go anywhere so it devolves into lamenting the "current political climate". I think this article makes the mistake of conflating the state of several large "AAA" publishers with the state of the games industry as a whole. I've long-since stopped caring about almost anything the "Big Three" (EA, Activision, and Ubisoft) have a hand in, and most other "AAA" publishers have damaged their reputation so much that I have practically zero anticipation for new games. There are many things companies in the gaming industry should do better, but I don't think the industry as a whole is in near as dire a state as the author describes. I wouldn't shed a tear if most of the "AAA" publishers disappeared tomorrow. There's still plenty of great games coming out from developers and publishers with much cleaner reputations.